Apologies for the long delay in posting. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve still not bought a coffee machine, but it’s not stopped me from having a fairly productive few weeks.

Lumo

Yes, it’s finally out on the Switch and just in time for Xmas! The port was done by Spiral House Ltd and I’m very pleased with the result. After all the hassles JAW had with Unity on Vita, I was
worried that the same problems might plague Unity on the Switch, but fortunately that doesn’t appear to be the case.

To all intents and purposes Lumo on the Switch is identical to the PS4 version, just capped at 30 fps. It’s also an unintentionally perfect game for the Switch, as the room based style of play
means you can pick it up for 10 minutes, run about and then put it down. Obviously I’m a massive fan-boy for the Switch, but I really did enjoy going back to the game and playing it on the go. It feels perfect.

There are physical copies in the EU and US, but not a lot of them so hit up Amazon if you’re after one. They’re going to disappear quickly.

Fortunately I’ve not had to do much PR for this release, but I did do an AMA on r/NintendoSwitch. Many thanks to Tim and the other mods there for inviting me on. :)

Little Breton

With Psyance parked until I decide how to get some art done, I’ve moved on to the other idea that’s been bubbling away in the back of my head. In some respects this is a bit of a spiritual sequel to Lumo, as
the big problem I kept facing when making that game was to stop myself from turning it into a massive Zelda dungeon. Head over Heels and co. largely kept their puzzles restricted to single rooms, and so I wanted Lumo
to stick to that template, which meant not doing certain things.

So sod it, it’s time to make some Zelda dungeons :)

I’ll post more info on this after Xmas. For now I’m busy making modular art pieces so I can start sketching out a world to run around in.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve moved house. Enough that I should be a bit of an expert at it, or at least, not underestimate how long it takes to sort everything out once I’ve “unpacked”. As it was, the first three weeks of October were a right-off, but bar buying a new coffee machine I’m basically good to go, I‘m back on the ‘net, and I’ve just come back from a much more chilled few days in the UK to celebrate my birthday.

Go go go!

Unfortunately, a few more things changed than just my location. It’s been a weird month.

Next Game

I’ve not written about this in detail for a while, mainly because progress has been so stop-start it’s been hard to wrap-up the work into an interesting post.

Where am I? I think from the code point of view I’ve got pretty much everything in place for a networked, multi-player game. Steam integration is working, you can join / leave hosted games through friend invites, browsing for public hosted games works, the co-op and TDM modes work, environmental stuff like trigger operated doors and moving platforms are in, pick-ups, weapon types, ammo, projectiles, area explosions, AI spawning, death— everything you’d expect from a game of Quake — is in and working. But it’s hit a wall.

I’ve lost some collaborators (totally understandably, and I’m amazingly grateful for their help to-date) and I’ve not got the money to sub-contract out in order to hit the quality bar that I want. So I’m left with a choice: rollback on the art/audio/VFX-sides, and maybe go for something like Strafe or Gibhard, or, come back to this project if-and-when I have the cash to bring on a couple of people for a few months.

I probably could hit a nice retro-feel with some low poly characters and pixely textures, but I think Strafe’s got that covered now and I don’t want to re-tread that ground. Going even more coarsely grained, almost Doom2-like, is an option, but again, feels like a step back from what I have in my head. So I’m going to park this.

If I’m honest, every step in this project has been just a smidge harder than it should have been, not least because of some seismic shifts in my personal-life that have royally fucked my ability to focus, but I’m inclined to listen to the universe and accept that this “isn’t the one”. Meh.

I still want to make a really fucking fast, twitchy FPS, so I’m not ready to let this go completely. Which means maintaining it with each UE4 upgrade and biding my time…

Neutrino

Man, I’m so fucking glad that I decided to roll with a little side-project, post Lumo. Being able to work on something when surrounded by boxes, on a train, bus, or stuck in an airport, has been a life-saver. I’d be much more stressed if I was looking back on October as being entirely unproductive.

The fruits of this half-arsed labour?

Behold, my nearly finished Gun Editor.

Yup, dead simple, probably only a day’s work, but I’ve also gone through and cleaned up a few hanging TODO items, and added viewport scaling to the mouse wheel for the editor modes.

I need to add the bullet definitions to this, then do a particle emitter editor, at which point I literally have no more excuses. I need to be making a game with this. But I’m not going to go back to it until Xmas.

ImGui has been a lifesaver, again, as it took very little time to put together enough UI to load, save and edit curves. There’s no real limit to the number of curves I can chain together, but in practice, two or three is more than enough. It’s simple, but it works.

The other nice addition to Neutrino, as you can see above, is embedded .GIF output. Totally stole this idea from Philip Bak, but it makes perfect sense; in a world where you need to fire out screenshots on social media as often as possible, what could be better than pressing a button and getting an animated .GIF, resized for Twitter?

We both opted to use this single header lib from Charlie Tangora. 3 function calls and Bob’s your mother’s brother. Perfect.

Other stuff that’s been done:

Simple timer based callbacks, so single entities don’t need to constantly poll their state, they can just ask to do something in the future.

Start of a level sequencer… This is based off the camera position, and will be responsible for doing all the spawning and in-game events. I’ll probably do a ImGui editor for this and talk about it in a future post

Roughly sketched out how enemy entities will work. I’m trying to do existence based processing using a table layout — I’m high on Data Oriented Design kool-aid — so I’ll talk about this in a future post, once I’ve worked out how I’m doing it.

Ran the codebase through Valgrind and removed a bunch of silly little memory leaks. One problem with the stop/start nature of the way I work on this is that, sometimes, if I have to stop in the middle of something, I forget to go back and clean-up after myself. I’ve got into the habit of just checking periodically in-case I’ve done something stupid. Normally I have ;D

A lot has been going on, on the dev-side, and in my personal life. I’ve had a bit of a holiday, I’ve been to the UK and back, and I’m at the start of trying to move away from Helsinki, and back to Tampere. My plans of a heads down summer of work didn’t really happen. Oh well :D

Neutrino

Due to the travel, hanging about in airports and nights in hotels, Neutrino has had a fair bit of attention. Effectively the engine side of it is complete.

Box2D has been integrated. I’m not a massive fan of Box2D, but it’s simple enough to use and reasonably fast for a small number of objects. I’ve gone the whole hog this time and written the debug renderer for the physics world! Seeing what’s happening under the hood really does make a difference.

Neutrino is still single threaded, and still, effectively, vsync locked. I’m going to do a bit of work at some point to move Box2D over to another thread and fix the fucking timestep, at which point it’d be interesting to see it run on a GSync screen. But anyway…

Still not much to look at, but it’s getting there. Next step is to make a particle emitter editor, bullet trajectory “pattern” editor and a spline editor for the attack waves. Then I think I can make some levels…

Next Game

A month or so ago I decided that I had a lot of bits, but I didn’t have a game. I really should start putting this all together.

Steam’s a good forcing function for this: If I’m going to make an online game then I really need to have it running through Steam and then get some other people to play it! To do that, I’ll need working UI and a proper flow in-and-out of the various game modes.

UI in UE4 is pretty lovely. UMG has its quirks, but it works, looks good, and compared to the complete abomination in Unity, is a joy to put together. And — shock — I really like Blueprints for chaining UI together. Delay node ftw!

That being said, there’s still a lot of UI screens to put together — once you throw in game-modes, with options, lobby screens, error handling etc. — but I have a working screen for each part of this (with no real thought applied to the styling atm) and I’m able to enter and exit a game.

Online Session handling (like pretty much everything else in UE4) is piss poorly documented. There’s a video showing you how to do it in Blueprints, and a working example in Shooter Game that does it in C++. Because it’s so intrinsically tied to the UI, for the first pass I opted to start a simple blueprint session and see if I can connect to it via Steam. This took the better part of a day, but it does actually work; I can see hosted games over Steam, pull up some small bits of information about them, and I can join and leave a session. Wow!

The problem is, the blueprint stuff doesn’t really have any idea about any of the custom parameters that define a hosted session, so I’m going to have to go back under the hood and do this properly in C++. Then I can filter against game mode, see the name of the server, handle friend invites and the like. But for now, just for the purposes of development, I have a “game” that I can upload to Steam, send to friends, and we can run about and shoot each.

Quick little update, especially for those of you that actually follow the blog, rather than catch me on Tumblr or Medium. Here’s the progress that I’ve been making on the AI in the test dungeon over the last 3 weeks:

I need to add in some animations to emphasis when he’s searching for you, and when he’s fleeing from you, along with some audio barks so it’s clear that the modes have changed. But he’s running about, shooting and trying his
best not to be a completely static target. Good enough, for now, but I’ll be coming back to this a lot over the course of development.